Under the Reagan Doctrine, the United States provided overt and covert aid to anti-communistguerrillas and resistance movements in an effort to "roll back" Soviet-backed pro-communist governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The doctrine was designed to diminish Soviet influence in these regions as part of the administration's overall strategy to win the Cold War.
Background
The Reagan Doctrine followed in the tradition of U.S. presidents developing foreign policy "doctrines", which were designed to reflect challenges facing international relations, and to propose foreign policy solutions. The practice began with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, and continued with the Roosevelt Corollary, sometimes called the Roosevelt Doctrine, introduced by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.
The post–World War II tradition of Presidential doctrines started with the Truman Doctrine in 1947, under which the US provided support to the governments of Greece and Turkey as part of a Cold War strategy to keep both nations out of the Soviet sphere of influence. It was followed by the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Kennedy Doctrine, the Johnson Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, and the Carter Doctrine, all of which defined the foreign policy approaches of these respective U.S. presidents on some of the largest global challenges of their presidencies.
At least one component of the Reagan Doctrine technically pre-dated the Reagan Presidency. In Afghanistan, the Carter administration began providing limited covert military assistance to Afghanistan's mujahideen in an effort to drive the Soviets out of the nation, or at least raise the military and political cost of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The policy of aiding the mujahideen in their war against the Soviet occupation was originally proposed by Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and was implemented by U.S. intelligence services. It enjoyed broad bipartisan political support.
Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson became obsessed with the Afghan cause, and was able to leverage his position on the House Appropriations committees to encourage other Democratic congressmen to vote for CIA Afghan war money, with the tacit approval of Speaker of the HouseTip O'Neill, even as the Democratic party lambasted Reagan for the CIA's secret war in Central America. It was a complex web of relationships described in George Crile III's book Charlie Wilson's War.[3]
Wilson teamed with CIA manager Gust Avrakotos and formed a team of a few dozen insiders who greatly enhanced the support for the Mujahideen, funneling it through Zia ul-Haq'sISI. Avrakotos and Wilson charmed leaders from various anti-Soviet countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and China to increase support for the rebels. Avrakotos hired Michael G. Vickers, a young Paramilitary Officer, to enhance the guerilla's odds by revamping the tactics, weapons, logistics, and training used by the Mujahideen.[3]Michael Pillsbury, a Pentagon official, and Vincent Cannistraro pushed the CIA to supply the Stinger missile to the rebels.[3] President Reagan's Covert Action program has been given credit for assisting in ending the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.[4][5]
Origin and advocates
With the arrival of the Reagan administration, The Heritage Foundation and other conservative foreign policy think tanks saw a political opportunity to significantly expand Carter's Afghanistan policy into a more global "doctrine", including U.S. support to anti-communist resistance movements in Soviet-allied nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. According to political analysts Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould, "it was the Heritage Foundation that translated theory into concrete policy. Heritage targeted nine nations for regime change: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua, and Vietnam".[6]
Throughout the 1980s, the Heritage Foundation's foreign policy expert on the Third World, Michael Johns, the foundation's principal Reagan Doctrine advocate, visited with resistance movements in Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and other Soviet-supported nations and urged the Reagan administration to initiate or expand military and political support to them. Heritage Foundation foreign policy experts also endorsed the Reagan Doctrine in two of their Mandate for Leadership books, which provided comprehensive policy advice to Reagan administration officials.[7]
In fact, the doctrine only applied to Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, Nicaragua and Mozambique,[8] while Afghanistan was the centerpiece of the doctrine.[9]
The result was that, unlike in Afghanistan, the Reagan Doctrine was rather quickly applied in Angola and Nicaragua, with the United States providing military support to the UNITA movement in Angola and the "contras" in Nicaragua, but without a declaration of war against either country. Addressing the Heritage Foundation in October 1989, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi called the Heritage Foundation's efforts "a source of great support. No Angolan will forget your efforts. You have come to Jamba, and you have taken our message to Congress and the Administration".[10] U.S. aid to UNITA began to flow overtly after Congress repealed the Clark Amendment, a long-standing legislative prohibition on military aid to UNITA.[10]
Following these victories, Johns and the Heritage Foundation urged further expanding the Reagan Doctrine to Ethiopia, where they argued that the Ethiopian famine was a product of the military and agricultural policies of Ethiopia's Soviet-supported Mengistu Haile Mariam government. Johns and Heritage also argued that Mengistu's decision to permit a Soviet naval and air presence on the Red Sea ports of Eritrea represented a strategic challenge to U.S. security interests in the Middle East and North Africa.[11]
The Heritage Foundation and the Reagan administration also sought to apply the Reagan Doctrine in Cambodia. The largest resistance movement fighting Cambodia's communist government was largely made up of members of the former Khmer Rouge regime, whose human rights record was among the worst of the 20th century. Therefore, Reagan authorized the provision of aid to a smaller Cambodian resistance movement, a coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, known as the KPNLF and then run by Son Sann; in an effort to force an end to the Vietnamese occupation.[12]
While the Reagan Doctrine enjoyed strong support from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute opposed the Reagan Doctrine, arguing in 1986 that "most Third World struggles take place in arenas and involve issues far removed from legitimate American security needs. U.S. involvement in such conflicts expands the republic's already overextended commitments without achieving any significant prospective gains. Instead of draining Soviet military and financial resources, we end up dissipating our own."[13]
Even Cato, however, conceded that the Reagan Doctrine had "fired the enthusiasm of the conservative movement in the United States as no foreign policy issue has done in decades". While opposing the Reagan Doctrine as an official governmental policy, Cato instead urged Congress to remove the legal barriers prohibiting private organizations and citizens from supporting these resistance movements.[14]
Reagan himself was a vocal proponent of the policy. Seeking to expand Congressional support for the doctrine in the 1985 State of the Union Address in February 1985, Reagan said: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives ... on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua ... to defy Soviet aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth. Support for freedom fighters is self-defense".
As part of his effort to gain Congressional support for the Nicaraguan contras, Reagan labeled the contras "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers", which was controversial because the contras had shown a disregard for human rights.[16] There also were allegations that some members of the contra leadership were involved in cocaine trafficking.[17]
Reagan and other conservative advocates of the Reagan Doctrine advocates also argued that the doctrine served U.S. foreign policy and strategic objectives and was a moral imperative against the former Soviet Union, which Reagan, his advisers, and supporters labeled an "evil empire".
Other advocates
Other early conservative advocates for the Reagan Doctrine included influential activist Grover Norquist, who ultimately became a registered UNITA lobbyist and an economic adviser to Savimbi's UNITA movement in Angola,[18] and former Reagan speechwriter and former U.S. CongressmanDana Rohrabacher, who made several secret visits with the mujahideen in Afghanistan and returned with glowing reports of their bravery against the Soviet occupation.[19] Rohrabacher was led to Afghanistan by his contact with the mujahideen, Jack Wheeler.[20]
Phrase's origin
In 1985, as U.S. support was flowing to the Mujahideen, Savimbi's UNITA, and the Nicaraguan Contras, columnist Charles Krauthammer, in an essay for Time magazine, labeled the policy the "Reagan Doctrine," and the name stuck.[21]
Krauthammer has said of his writing in support of the Reagan Doctrine,
I basically came to the conclusion ... the Soviets had overextended their empire, and they were getting what the West had gotten with its overextended empire decades before a reaction, they got a rebellion, they got resistance. And the Soviets were now beginning to feel it, and the genius of Reagan, although I don't think they had a plan in doing this is he instinctively realized that one of the ways to go after the Soviets was indirect, and that is you go after their proxies, you go after their allies, you go after their clients, or even in Afghanistan you go after them directly. So that's what I called the Reagan Doctrine, it was sort of the opposite of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was whatever we control we keep. And Reagan was saying, no you don't.[22]
The Reagan Doctrine was especially significant because it represented a substantial shift in the post–World War II foreign policy of the United States. Prior to the Reagan Doctrine, U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War was rooted in "containment", as originally defined by George F. Kennan, John Foster Dulles, and other post–World War II U.S. foreign policy experts. In January 1977, four years prior to becoming president, Reagan bluntly stated, in a conversation with Richard V. Allen, his basic expectation in relation to the Cold War. "My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic," he said. "It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?"[23]
Although a similar policy of "rollback" had been considered on a few occasions during the Cold War, the U.S. government, fearing an escalation of the Cold War and possible nuclear conflict, chose not to confront the Soviet Union directly. With the Reagan Doctrine, those fears were set aside and the United States began to openly confront Soviet-supported governments through support of rebel movements in the doctrine's targeted countries.
One perceived benefit of the Reagan Doctrine was the relatively low cost of supporting guerrilla forces compared to the Soviet Union's expenses in propping up client states. Another benefit was the lack of direct involvement of American troops, which allowed the United States to confront Soviet allies without sustaining casualties. Especially since the September 11 attacks, some Reagan Doctrine critics have argued that, by facilitating the transfer of large amounts of weapons to various areas of the world and by training military leaders in these regions, the Reagan Doctrine actually contributed to "blowback" by strengthening some political and military movements that ultimately developed hostility toward the United States, such as al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.[24] However, no direct U.S. aid to Osama bin Laden or any of his affiliates has ever been established.[25]
Historian Greg Grandin described a disjuncture between official ideals preached by the United States and actual U.S. support for terrorism. "Nicaragua, where the United States backed not a counter insurgent state but anti-communist mercenaries, likewise represented a disjuncture between the idealism used to justify U.S. policy and its support for political terrorism. ... The corollary to the idealism embraced by the Republicans in the realm of diplomatic public policy debate was thus political terror. In the dirtiest of Latin America's dirty wars, their faith in America's mission justified atrocities in the name of liberty".[26] Grandin examined the behaviour of the U.S.-backed contras and found evidence that it was particularly inhumane and vicious: "In Nicaragua, the U.S.-backed Contras decapitated, castrated, and otherwise mutilated civilians and foreign aid workers. Some earned a reputation for using spoons to gouge their victims' eyes out. In one raid, Contras cut the breasts of a civilian defender to pieces and ripped the flesh off the bones of another."[27]
Professor Frederick H. Gareau has written that the Contras "attacked bridges, electric generators, but also state-owned agricultural cooperatives, rural health clinics, villages, and non-combatants". U.S. agents were directly involved in the fighting. "CIA commandos launched a series of sabotage raids on Nicaraguan port facilities. They mined the country's major ports and set fire to its largest oil storage facilities." In 1984 the U.S. Congress ordered this intervention to be stopped; however, it was later shown that the Reagan administration illegally continued (See Iran–Contra affair). Gareau has characterized these acts as "wholesale terrorism" by the United States.[28]
A CIA manual for training the Nicaraguan Contras in psychological operations, leaked to the media in 1984, entitled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War".[29] recommended "selective use of violence for propagandistic effects" and to "neutralize" government officials. Nicaraguan Contras were taught to lead:
... selective use of armed force for PSYOP psychological operations effect. ... Carefully selected, planned targets– judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc.– may be removed for PSYOP effect in a UWOA unconventional warfare operations area, but extensive precautions must insure that the people "concur" in such an act by thorough explanatory canvassing among the affected populace before and after conduct of the mission.
Similarly, former diplomat Clara Nieto, in her book Masters of War, charged that "the CIA launched a series of terrorist actions from the "mothership" off Nicaragua's coast. In September 1983, she charged the agency attacked Puerto Sandino with rockets. The following month, frogmen blew up the underwater oil pipeline in the same port – the only one in the country. In October there was an attack on Puerto Corinto, Nicaragua's largest port, with mortars, rockets, and grenades blowing up five large oil and gasoline storage tanks. More than a hundred people were wounded, and the fierce fire, which could not be brought under control for two days, forced the evacuation of 23,000 people."[31]
The International Court of Justice, when judging the case of Nicaragua v. United States in 1984, found that the United States was obligated to pay reparations to Nicaragua, because it had violated international law by actively supporting the Contras in their rebellion and by mining the Naval waters of Nicaragua.[32] The United States refused to participate in the proceedings after the Court rejected its argument that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. The U.S. later blocked the enforcement of the judgment by exercising its veto power in the United Nations Security Council and so prevented Nicaragua from obtaining any actual compensation.[33]
Covert implementation
As the Reagan administration set about implementing The Heritage Foundation plan in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, it first attempted to do so covertly, not as part of official policy. "The Reagan government's initial implementation of the Heritage plan was done covertly", according to the book Rollback, "following the longstanding custom that containment can be overt but rollback should be covert". Ultimately, however, the administration supported the policy more openly.
Congressional votes
While the doctrine benefited from strong support from the Reagan administration, The Heritage Foundation and several influential Members of Congress, many votes on critical funding for resistance movements, especially the Nicaraguan contras, were extremely close, making the Reagan Doctrine one of the more contentious American political issues of the 1980s.[34]
The Cold War's end
As arms flowed to the contras, Savimbi's UNITA and the mujahideen, the Reagan Doctrine's advocates argued that the doctrine was yielding constructive results for U.S. interests and global democracy.
In Nicaragua, pressure from the Contras led the Sandinstas to end the State of Emergency, and they subsequently lost the 1990 elections. In Afghanistan, the mujahideen bled the Soviet Union's military and paved the way for Soviet military defeat. In Angola, Savimbi's resistance ultimately led to a decision by the Soviet Union and Cuba to bring their troops and military advisors home from Angola as part of a negotiated settlement.
All of these developments were Reagan Doctrine victories, the doctrine's advocates argue, laying the ground for the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union.[35] Michael Johns later argued that "the Reagan-led effort to support freedom fighters resisting Soviet oppression led successfully to the first major military defeat of the Soviet Union ... Sending the Red Army packing from Afghanistan proved one of the single most important contributing factors in one of history's most profoundly positive and important developments".[36]
Thatcher's view
Among others, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, credited the Reagan Doctrine with aiding the end of the Cold War. In December 1997, Thatcher said that the Reagan Doctrine "proclaimed that the truce with communism was over. The West would henceforth regard no area of the world as destined to forego its liberty simply because the Soviets claimed it to be within their sphere of influence. We would fight a battle of ideas against communism, and we would give material support to those who fought to recover their nations from tyranny".[37]
Iran–Contra affair
U.S. funding for the Contras, who opposed the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, was obtained from covert sources. The U.S. Congress did not authorize sufficient funds for the Contras' efforts, and the Boland Amendment barred further funding. In 1986, in an episode that became known as The Iran–Contra affair, the Reagan administration illegally facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo, in the hope that the arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
End
The Reagan Doctrine continued into the administration of Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, who won the U.S. presidency in November 1988. Bush's presidency featured the final years of the Cold War and the Gulf War, but the Reagan Doctrine soon faded from U.S. policy as the Cold War ended.[38] Bush also noted a presumed peace dividend to the end of the Cold War with economic benefits of a decrease in defense spending. However, following the presidency of Bill Clinton, a change in United States foreign policy was introduced with the presidency of his son George W. Bush and the new Bush Doctrine, who increased military spending in response to the September 11th attacks.
In Nicaragua, the Contra War ended after the Sandinista government, facing military and political pressure, agreed to new elections, in which the contras' political wing participated, in 1990. In Angola, an agreement in 1989 met Savimbi's demand for the removal of Soviet, Cuban and other military troops and advisers from Angola. Also in 1989, in relation to Afghanistan, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev labeled the war against the U.S.-supported mujahideen a "bleeding wound" and ended the Soviet occupation of the country.[39]
In popular culture
Charlie Wilson's War, a Golden Globe Award and Oscar-nominated Universal Pictures film released in December 2007, depicts early U.S. efforts to provide military support to the Afghan mujahideen following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Miami, a 1987 book by Joan Didion covers U.S. efforts to overthrow communist governments, including that of Fidel Castro in Cuba.
The Kirkpatrick Doctrine was the doctrine expounded by United States Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick in the early 1980s based on her 1979 essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards". The doctrine was used to justify the U.S. foreign policy of supporting Third World anti-communist dictatorships during the Cold War.
The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola is the second-largest political party in Angola. Founded in 1966, UNITA fought alongside the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) in the Angolan War for Independence (1961–1975) and then against the MPLA in the ensuing civil war (1975–2002). The war was one of the most prominent Cold War proxy wars, with UNITA receiving military aid initially from the People's Republic of China from 1966 until October 1975 and later from the United States and apartheid South Africa while the MPLA received support from the Soviet Union and its allies, especially Cuba.
Jonas Malheiro Savimbi was an Angolan revolutionary, politician, and rebel military leader who founded and led the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). UNITA was one of several groups which waged a guerrilla war against Portuguese colonial rule from 1966 to 1974. Once independence was achieved, it then became an anti-communist group which confronted the ruling People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) during the Angolan Civil War. Savimbi had extensive contact with anti-communist activists in the United States, including Jack Abramoff and was one of the leading anti-communist voices in the world. Savimbi was killed in a clash with government troops in 2002.
A United States presidential doctrine comprises the key goals, attitudes, or stances for United States foreign affairs outlined by a president. Most presidential doctrines are related to the Cold War. Though many U.S. presidents had themes related to their handling of foreign policy, the term doctrine generally applies to presidents such as James Monroe, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, all of whom had doctrines which more completely characterized their foreign policy.
In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing a change in the major policies of a state, usually by replacing its ruling regime. It contrasts with containment, which means preventing the expansion of that state; and with détente, which means developing a working relationship with that state. Most of the discussions of rollback in the scholarly literature deal with United States foreign policy toward communist countries during the Cold War. The rollback strategy was tried and was not successful in Korea in 1950 and in Cuba in 1961, but it was successful in Grenada in 1983. The United States discussed the use of rollback during the East German uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which were ultimately crushed by the Soviet Army, but decided against it to avoid the risk of a major war.
Blowback is the unintended consequences and unwanted side-effects of a covert operation. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as "random" acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name the intelligence agency acted—are unaware of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them.
The Angolan Civil War was a civil war in Angola, beginning in 1975 and continuing, with interludes, until 2002. The war began immediately after Angola became independent from Portugal in November 1975. It was a power struggle between two former anti-colonial guerrilla movements, the communist People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
Citizens for America (CFA) was a United States conservative grass-roots organization founded by President Ronald Reagan's "Kitchen Cabinet" to support President Reagan's national defense and economic initiatives. CFA called itself "President Reagan's Lobby" and was led first by drugstore magnate Lewis E. Lehrman and later by Gerald P. Carmen, who had served as administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA) and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations mission in Geneva, Switzerland. CFA was organized as an IRS 501 (C) (3) and (4) non-profit. Among the early employees was Jack Abramoff, who was later terminated for cause.
Jamba is a town in Angola, located in the southeastern province of Cuando Cubango, just north of the Namibian border along the Caprivi Strip.
Angola and the United States have maintained cordial diplomatic relations since 1993. Before then, antagonism between the countries hinged on Cold War geopolitics, which led the U.S. to support anti-government rebels during the protracted Angolan Civil War.
American foreign policy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) focused heavily on the Cold War which shifted from détente to confrontation. The Reagan Administration pursued a policy of rollback with regards to communist regimes. The Reagan Doctrine operationalized these goals as the United States offered financial, logistical, training, and military equipment to anti-communist opposition in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. He expanded support to anti-communist movements in Central and Eastern Europe.
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted their own separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.
The Safari Club was a covert alliance of intelligence services formed in 1976 that ran clandestine operations around Africa at a time when the United States Congress had limited the power of the CIA after years of abuses and when Portugal was dismantling its colonial empire in Africa. Its formal members were pre-revolutionary Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and France. The group maintained informal connections with the United States, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Israel. The group executed a successful military intervention in Zaire in response to an invasion from Angola. It also provided arms to Somalia during the Ogaden War. It organized secret diplomacy relating to anti-communism in Africa, and has been credited with initiating the process resulting in the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty.
Operation IA Feature, a covert Central Intelligence Agency operation, authorized U.S. government support for Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and Holden Roberto's National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) militants in the Angolan Civil War. It was closely linked with parallel efforts by South Africa and Zaire. President Gerald Ford approved the program on July 18, 1975 despite strong opposition from officials in the State Department and the CIA. The program's discovery shocked Congress into barring further U.S. involvement in Angola's Civil War through the Clark Amendment.
In the 1980s in Angola, fighting spread outward from the southeast, where most of the fighting had taken place in the 1970s, as the African National Congress (ANC) and SWAPO increased their activity. The South African government responded by sending troops back into Angola, intervening in the war from 1981 to 1987, prompting the Soviet Union to deliver massive amounts of military aid from 1981 to 1986. The USSR gave the Angolan government over US$2 billion in aid in 1984. In 1981, newly elected United States President Ronald Reagan's U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker, developed a linkage policy, tying Namibian independence to Cuban withdrawal and peace in Angola.
Relations between Angola and South Africa in the post-apartheid era are quite strong as the ruling parties in both states, the African National Congress in South Africa and the MPLA in Angola, fought together during the Angolan Civil War and South African Border War. They fought against UNITA rebels, based in Angola, and the apartheid-era government in South Africa which supported them. Nelson Mandela mediated between the MPLA and UNITA during the final years of the Angolan Civil War. Although South Africa was preponderant in terms of relative capabilities during the late twentieth century, the recent growth of Angola has led to a more balanced relation.
Soviet–Angolan relations were close until the Angolan government renounced Marxist-Leninism in 1990 and adopted a pro-Western foreign policy. The close, personal relationship between President Agostinho Neto and Cuban leader Fidel Castro complicated the Soviet Union's involvement in the Angolan Civil War and foiled several assassination attempts against Neto.
In the 1990s in Angola, the last decade of the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), the Angolan government transitioned from a nominally communist state to a nominally democratic one, a move made possible by political changes abroad and military victories at home. Namibia's declaration of independence, internationally recognized on April 1, eliminated the southwestern front of combat as South African forces withdrew to the east. The MPLA abolished the one-party system in June and rejected Marxist-Leninism at the MPLA's third Congress in December, formally changing the party's name from the MPLA-PT to the MPLA. The National Assembly passed law 12/91 in May 1991, coinciding with the withdrawal of the last Cuban troops, defining Angola as a "democratic state based on the rule of law" with a multi-party system.
This article deals with the activities of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Angola. The list of activities may be incomplete due to the clandestine nature of the subject matter.
Since the 19th century, the United States government has participated and interfered, both overtly and covertly, in the replacement of many foreign governments. In the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. government initiated actions for regime change mainly in Latin America and the southwest Pacific, including the Spanish–American and Philippine–American wars. At the onset of the 20th century, the United States shaped or installed governments in many countries around the world, including neighbors Hawaii, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
References
↑ Chester Pach, 'The Reagan Doctrine: Principle, Pragmatism, and Policy" Presidential Studies Quarterly, March 2006. p 75
↑ Peter Schweitzer (1994). Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Paperback), Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 213
↑ "Jeff Jacoby". jewishworldreview.com. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2006-08-26.
↑ "The Contras and Cocaine"Archived 2012-07-22 at archive.today , Progressive Review, testimony to U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Hearing on the Allegations of CIA Ties to Nicaraguan Contra Rebels and Crack Cocaine in American Cities, October 23, 1996.
↑ Nieto, Clara (2003). Masters of War: Latin America and United States Aggression from the Cuban Revolution Through the Clinton Years. New York: Seven Stories Press. pp.343–45. ISBN1-58322-545-5.
Beitz, Charles R. "The Reagan Doctrine in Nicaragua." in Problems of International Justice ewd. by Steven Luper-foy, (Routledge, 2019) pp. 182-195.
Bodenheimer, Thomas S., and Robert Gould. "US Military Doctrines and Their Relation to Foreign Policy." in Hemispheric security and US policy in Latin America (Routledge, 2019) pp. 7-32.
Greentree, Todd. "The origins of the Reagan Doctrine Wars in Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan" (Diss. University of Oxford, 2016) online.
Hopf, Ted. "Peripheral Visions: Brezhnev and Gorbachev Meet the" Reagan Doctrine"." in Learning in US and Soviet foreign policy ed by George Breslauer and Philip Tetlock. (Routledge, 2019) pp. 586-629.
Johns, Andrew L., ed. A Companion to Ronald Reagan (John Wiley & Sons, 2014). pp 339–358.
Lagon, Mark P. The Reagan Doctrine: Sources of American Conduct in the Cold War's Last Chapter (1984) onlineArchived 2019-01-27 at the Wayback Machine
Loconte, Joseph. "American Exceptionalism and the Reagan Doctrine: The Belief That Won the Cold War." in The Reagan Manifesto (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2016) pp. 77-96.
Meiertöns, Heiko (2010). The Doctrines of US Security Policy: An Evaluation under International Law. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-76648-7.
Pach, Chester. “The Reagan Doctrine: Principle, Pragmatism, and Policy," Presidential Studies Quarterly (2006) 36#1 p.75+ onlineArchived 2020-08-06 at the Wayback Machine
Schmertz, Eric J. Natalie Datlof, and Alexej Ugrinsky eds. President Reagan and the World (1997) onlineArchived 2019-01-27 at the Wayback Machine
Scott, James M. "Reagan's doctrine? The formulation of an American foreign policy strategy" Presidential Studies Quarterly (1996) 26#4 pp 1047–61. online
Scott, James M. Deciding to intervene: the Reagan doctrine and American foreign policy (1996)
Starr-Deelen, Donna. Presidential Policies on Terrorism: From Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. (Springer, 2014).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
